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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Gregory Harbin
Critics do this all the time. They decide they don't like a movie, so they complain about the first things they can think of off the top of their head.
See: the 'aliens' in AI, or when Ebert complained about the tripod machines in 'War of the Worlds,' and many other examples.
What if…not only the whole movie was inside of Cobb's dream, but what if Cobb's dream was, itself, inside of a movie, which was viewed by us in the movie theater?! That would mean that everything that happened, from the moment we sat down in our seats, never actually happened, but was actually part of an architected dreamscape forced on us by a film director!
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
So I'm pretty sure that Cobb is still in a dream, judging by the top still spinning at the end. I think he'll ignore it, though, possibly having one of his projections pick it up subconsciously so he never has to see that it was spinning, then he'll just never spin it again.
So the question is, where did the dream begin? I'm really, really loath to assume that everything that happened in the movie was in a dream from the very start—mainly because it means that all the characters we met were never real, and that kind of invalidates what we spent two (three?) hours getting invested in.
Here's my pet theory, and feel more than free to point out how wrong I am: Saito was never able to magically get Cobb pardoned. His plan from the start was to have Cobb pull the job, and then pay off someone on his team to keep him under after the job is up. So everything that happens to Cobb after he wakes up—notice how the film stays with him entirely until the final shot—is inside of a dream that was created for him by Saito after the job was completed.
This means that Mal is still dead, and Cobb doesn't reunite with his children, but it does mean that the movie wasn't all a fantasy.
I'm sure Scott…Steve…Frogurt, whatever his name is, could speak to why trailer editors have to use themes from earlier movies in trailers, and what forces end up making the same five themes be used over and over.
Get 'im in here!
I felt regret, that's for sure. Regret that I watched the movie more than once.
/snark
So I've been experimenting with 3D photography, specifically stereography. I use a program called 3D Camera Studio on my iPad, which allows me to combine two photos taken by the same camera into a single image. What I usually create is one with the R/L images next to each other, so I just have to cross my eyes, and boom, 3D. If anyone has a 3D display, though, this program will also export in several formats that work there, OR it'll do the stuff for red/blue glasses.
I've been really happy with a lot of my results. I've got an album on Facebook that I put a lot of stuff on there, so please check it out. It's here: HERE
And here's a few choice selections. If you don't know how to view them, do some Googling on cross-eye stereograms.
Now that I've got you inspired, why don't you post some of your own 3D photography?
Blade Runner bores me to freaking TEARS. I love the production design, but I just don't get at all what people love about the movie.
And even going into a viewing KNOWING that there's a debate about whether Harrison Ford is a replicant or not, I don't see anything in the movie itself that hints one way or the other.
It's got just enough of a dreamlike quality to touch the ineffable.
Exactly my problem with the film. I hate the school of thought that says you should be vague because it says something about the human condition. No. You say something about the human condition by actually *saying* something.
Otherwise you're just an FC Rabbath film.
I loved Jackson's Kong. I don't know what he could have cut out. I even like the extended version.
For the record, I have read the entirety of LOTR as well. But it was over a decade ago, and I can't promise that I didn't skim it. I started the Hobbit the other day (I've read that one several times), but the Mistborn books are taking my attention ATM.
This is Not the Book for You, apparently.
Though I did notice something when I transcribed it that I hadn't been aware of while I was merely reading it: commas. Lots of commas. (Cue seemingly endless racks of punctuation marks whooshing into an otherwise empty void.)
Yeah, that's exactly the comment I made to Aimee after I snarked.
I sat, looking at the screen, large and powerful on my desk, and gazed, fervently, fluidly, and fastideously, into the paragraph of text, forged in England half a century ago, and tried, with all my might, to make it to the end, possibly not even to the end of the entire passage, but perhaps, in the trails and tribulations of time, to make it to the end of one single, solitary, sobering, scintillating, scornful sentence.
tl, dr.
I mean, that paragraph.
Geeze.
I'd get there, I'd just skim it.
Get over yourself, Tolkein.
Gregory Harbin wrote:Didn't this commentary come out already?
No Greg, you just insist on datamining and finding commentaries early.
Showoff.
No, I think what happened was I was sick one day and I whined to Fig for something to listen to.
I'm way too lazy to try to figure out where on the server the files are.
I honestly just thought Alien 4 had already been released.
Didn't this commentary come out already?
I'm not buying that the future stuff happened. There's a STRONG implication that it is all the chapter of the book that Thomas wrote. The only stuff that *actually* happened, including the conquistador stuff, was the cancer storyline. The rest of it was from the book.
And I don't think the book makes any sense outside of some poetic language about the beauty of death.
Questions that I had that the commentary doesn't answer:
1. How does Thomas change the past?
2. Why does Future Tom appear to the Mayan priest?
3. What kind of author leaves the end of the book to her scientist husband?
Hey, did you know they have this giant frickin' antenna in the middle of the city?
So ugly. Ugly ugly ugly.
I really want to rewatch this movie before listening to the commentary. I only watched it once, a long time ago, and I don't really remember what I thought of it. Thoughts of the commentary to come.
Fardawg, I would take you more seriously, or at least pretend to, if you didn't post two, three, four, and even five posts in a row. Edit your earlier post, or better yet, make sure you've fully thought through what you want to say before you hit 'submit.'
Please.
Brian's right. As I work on structuring my own sci-fi epic (thread to come), I'm trying to avoid many of the problems Moore and his team ran into.
The main one being, too much of an overarching mythology that wasn't figured out beforehand.
I'm currently reading the Mistborn trilogy (Brandon Sanderson, I recommend it for fans of *hard* fantasy). It has GOBS of mythology, a backstory that's being pieced together bit by bit, but the difference is, Sanderson knew what was coming from the very beginning. Certainly, not before he ever started writing it, but before he published a single page, he knew why the world was covered in ash by day and mists by night.
I fully believe in having organic stories, in not having character arcs planned from the start, for coming up with an idea in season 4 that you had never thought of before, and inserting it. But not at the cost of a mythology you've set up. That has to stay consistant, otherwise you're going to lose the audience.
Which, by the way, the bit of Battlestar I *mainly* argue with is the revelation of the Final Five. While their retconning works for the most part, the very fact that it wasn't foreshadowed makes it not a twist, but a deus ex machina.
Remember the wise words that someone said that I'm too lazy to look up:
"All endings are deus ex machinas, the difference is that some writers go back and put in clues."
In 96?
I woulda been 5, thank ya very much.
You still didn't answer the question.
Sorry, buddy, we don't allow anyone born in the 90's to post here. That's just too creepy.
But to answer your question, the promotional abbreviation of the film was ID4, playing off the July 4th date. It was extremely common and well-known at the time. I don't think I've ever heard anyone call it 'Independence Day 4.'
Alright I am so fukin confused...why does everyone refer to this as Independence Day 4???
How old were you in 1997?
There aren't many movies out there with cool mathematicians.
And yet all the ones that exist seem to star Jeff Goldblum.
Watching '1969.'
Am I supposed to buy that Hammond has known about this from the beginning of the series?
EDIT: ANOTHER CLIP SHOW ARE YOU KIDDING ME
Man, Walter (unscheduled off world activation!) just completely disappears after the first bit of season two, doesn't he?
Btw: Reetu > Species 8472
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Gregory Harbin
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